The vow system is an interesting look at not just how the BOTW format handles the long running feature of companion characters seen in a number of Zelda games but also how they are going to be utilised in future games. Once you get two or more it feels like you have an Rpg party with you, this was likely Monoliths influence as it's reminiscent of XBC3. 

*gathering as many monster eyeballs and arrows as possible* I'm gonna fucking kill you, Frost Gleeock!!

Hm...well...second Temple (Water)...really disappointing, getting to it was so-so, but Temple itself was really, really short and easy, and boss fight was hilariously easy.

At this point I'm starting to think Nintendo just straight out lied about Dungeons being more like classic Zelda Dungeons - so far I find even Divine Beasts to be better than temples in TotK.

After about a week of playing which has amounted to a lot of hours already I feel that TOTK is probably the best in the franchise by a significant margin, will find some time next week to detail why but so far I don't see how the franchise can go back. Fusion is the best ability in the series by miles it really changes up how to approach the game.

In an article from the Washington Post, it turns out Nintendo realized their secretive marketing wasn't working and threw together that 13 minute gameplay demonstration in April as a response to the lack of enthusiasm.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/05/20/eiji-aonuma-zelda-tears-kingdom-producer/

I mean, who would've thought, people actually wanted information about the latest Zelda game lmao
Good to see they recognized their error at least.

Beat it today after 48 hours and a nice even 96 shrines. My overall thoughts: the game feels a lot like Breath of the Wild 2.0. This has its advantages and disadvantages.

On one hand, the gameplay is a better version of BOTW; more creative and more mature. It'll be hard to go back to magnesis after ultrahand for instance. Or not count with recall to cheese the hell out of most shrines and temples. Building new things and seeing them working is fun, though usually you'll spend more time building than actually using them.

On the other hand, the plot and the story beats feel like the same thing you've done before. You got beat up hard, need to recover your power through shrines, the four regions are ailing, go help your local teammate, gain new power after a small dungeon, a relative from the past gives them a pep talk, etc.

The sky islands are nice. The procedurally generated depths, though, get tiresome after a very short while. The temples are just like Divine Beasts, which was disappointing but the quests involving them were for the most part great.

Also, despite the little nods here and there, this feels like an alternate universe to BOTW. Almost no one even mentions it in-game which makes sense for new players I suppose, but still a bit disappointing.

I'll give a nice 8 out of 10: solid gameplay, the artstyle is great, weak story with some repetition from BOTW. Truly the Gold/Silver versions to BOTW's Red/Blue.

I see a 96 on metracritic, never heard of open critic

The depths are not procedurally generated. How do you even get that idea?

I honestly thought after Botw if had the potential the be one of the greatest games of all time. my main complaints was the combat was average at best , and the rewards for completing shrines were useless after 50. i was expecting a huge jump in graphics as well. if they fixed the combat, upgrade the graphics and just gave us BOTW in settings i would take that all day over this. 

I'm not saying that the depths change or that there's a different seed for each playthrough or player, just that it has the obvious markers of most of it having been auto-generated with human retouches. Just look at it (distribution of gloom, trees, outposts etc.) and compare it to the overworld:

Besides, there was a specific bug in earlier versions of the emulators that happened in the depths far from important areas such as the light roots. It could only have happened if the heightmaps in non-important areas was automatically placed.